The D.C. Court of Appeals ruled against a challenge to the law that will force the Chinese company ByteDance to sell the platform
The D.C. Court of Appeals has upheld a law that would ban TikTok in the United States unless its Chinese parent company ByteDance sells the popular social media platform.
In a Friday ruling, Senior Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote that “the portions of the [Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act] the petitioners have standing to challenge, that is the provisions concerning TikTok and its related entities, survive constitutional scrutiny.”
“On the merits, we reject each of the petitioners’ constitutional claims,” he added. “As we shall explain, the parts of the Act that are properly before this court do not contravene the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, nor do they violate the Fifth Amendment guarantee of equal protection of the laws; constitute an unlawful bill of attainder […] or work an uncompensated taking of private property in violation of the Fifth Amendment.”
TikTok and its co-petitioners will likely appeal the ruling to the conservative-controlled Supreme Court. The law is currently scheduled to take effect on January 19, 2025, barring an appeal.
The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act was signed into law by President Joe Biden in April. The legislation gave ByteDance 270 days to sell TikTok, or else the app would be banned in the United States. The law also created a process through which the president can designate other social media applications with ties to foreign governments as a national security risk and force a similar divestment.
In May, TikTok — along with eight creators on the app — filed the lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the legislation.
“Congress has taken the unprecedented step of expressly singling out and banning TikTok: a vibrant online forum for protected speech and expression used by 170 million Americans to create, share, and view videos over the Internet,” the company wrote in their initial filing.
“If Congress can do this, it can circumvent the First Amendment by invoking national security and ordering the publisher of any individual newspaper or website to sell to avoid being shut down,” the filing continued. “And for TikTok, any such divestiture would disconnect Americans from the rest of the global community on a platform devoted to shared content — an outcome fundamentally at odds with the Constitution’s commitment to both free speech and individual liberty.”
